And she was wholly herself again, with a desperate need to breathe.
Kerry wrestled the rock off her lap for the last time, kicking for a surface as far away as the sun. As she shot past Barnabas Marsh she was gripped by a terror that he would seize her ankle to pull her back down.
But she knew she could fight that, so what he did was worse somehow, nothing she knew that he could do, and maybe none of these unsuspecting men on the island did either. It was what sound could be if sound were needles, a piercing skirl that ripped through her like an electric shock and clapped her ears as sharply as a pressure wave. She spun in the water, not knowing up from down, and when she stabilised and saw Marsh nearby, she realised he wasn’t even directing this at her. She was just a bystander who got in the way. Instead, he was facing out to sea, the greater sea, unleashing this sound into the abyss.
She floundered to the surface and broke through, graceless and gasping, and heard Colonel Escovedo shout a command, and in the next instant heard the roar of an engine as the four-wheeler went racing up the rock-strewn slope of the island’s western edge. The chain snapped taut, and moments later Marsh burst from the shallows in a spray of surf and foam, dragged twisting up onto the beach. Someone fired a shot, and someone else another, and of course no one heard her calling from nearly a hundred feet out, treading water now, and they were all shooting, so none of them heard her cry out that they had the wrong idea. But bullets first, questions later, she supposed.
His blood was still red. She had to admit, she’d wondered.
* * *
It took the rest of the morning before she was ready to be debriefed, and Escovedo let her have it, didn’t press for too much, too soon. She needed to be warm again, needed to get past the shock of seeing Barnabas Marsh shot to pieces on the beach. Repellent though he was, she’d still linked with him in her way, whispered back and forth, and he’d been alive one minute, among the oldest living beings on the earth, then dead the next.
She ached from the sound he’d made, as if every muscle and organ inside her had been snapped like a rubber band. Her head throbbed with the assault on her ears.
In the colonel’s office, finally, behind closed doors, Kerry told him of the colossal ruins somewhere far beneath the sea.
“Does any of that even make sense?” she asked. “It doesn’t to me. It felt real enough at the time, but now… it has to have been a dream of his. Or maybe Marsh was insane. How could anyone have even known if he was?”
Behind his desk, Escovedo didn’t move for the longest time, leaning on his elbows and frowning at his interlaced hands. Had he heard her at all? Finally he unlocked one of the drawers and withdrew a folder; shook out some photos, then put one back and slid the rest across to her. Eight in all.
“What you saw,” he said. “Did it look anything like this?”
She put them in rows, four over four, like puzzle pieces, seeing how they might fit together. And she needed them all at once, to bludgeon herself into accepting the reality of it: stretches of walls, suggestions of towers, some standing, some collapsed, all fitted together from blocks of greenish stone that could have been shaped by both hammers and razors. Everything was restricted to what spotlights could reach, limned by a cobalt haze that faded into inky blackness. Here, too, were windows and gateways and wide, irregular terraces that might have been stairs, only for nothing that walked on human feet. There was no sense of scale, nothing to measure it by, but she’d sensed it once today already, and it had the feeling of enormity and measureless age.
It was the stuff of nightmares, out of place and out of time, waiting in the cold, wet dark.
“They’ve been enhanced because of the low-light conditions and the distance,” Escovedo said. “It’s like the shots of the Titanic. The only light down that far is what you can send on a submersible. Except the Navy’s lost every single one they’ve sent down there. They just go offline. These pictures… they’re from the one that lasted the longest.”
She looked up again. The folder they’d come from was gone. “You held one back. I can’t see it?”
He shook his head. “Need to know.”
“It shows something that different from the others?”
Nothing. He was as much a block of stone as the walls.
“Something living?” She remembered his description of the sound heard across three thousand miles of ocean: The analysts say it most closely matches a profile of something alive. “Is that it?”
“I won’t tell you you’re right.” He appeared to be choosing his words with care. “But if that’s what you’d picked up on out there with Marsh, then maybe we’d have a chance to talk about photo number nine.”
She wanted to know. Needed to know as badly as she’d needed to breathe this morning, waking up to herself too far under the surface of the sea.
“What about the rest of them? We can keep trying.”
He shook his head no. “We’ve come to the end of this experiment.
I’ve already arranged for your transportation back home tomorrow.” Just like that. It felt as if she were being fired. She hadn’t even delivered. She’d not told them anything they didn’t already know about. She’d only confirmed it. What had made that unearthly noise, what the Innsmouth prisoners were waiting for—that’s what they were really after.
“We’re only just getting started. You can’t rush something like this. There are sixty-two more of them over there, one of them is sure to—”
He cut her off with a slash of his hand. “Sixty-two of them who are in an uproar now. They didn’t see what happened to Marsh, but they’ve got the general idea.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to order his execution.”
“That was for you. I thought we were protecting you.” He held up his hands then, appeasement, time-out. “I appreciate your willingness to continue. I do. But even if they were still in what passes for a good mood with them, we’ve still reached an impasse here. You can’t get through to them on our turf, and I can’t risk sending you back out with another of them onto theirs. It doesn’t matter that Marsh didn’t actually attack you. I can’t risk another of them doing what he did to make me think he had.”
“I don’t follow you.” It had been uncomfortable, yes, and she had no desire to experience it again, but it was hardly fatal.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what that sound he made meant,” Escovedo said. “What I keep coming back to is that he was sending a distress call.”
* * *
She wished she could’ve left the island sooner. That the moment the colonel told her they were finished, he’d already had the helicopter waiting. However late they got her home again, surely by now she would be in her own bed, holding her daughter close because she needed her even more than Tabby needed her.
Awake part of the time and a toss-up the rest, asleep but dreaming she was still trying to get there. Caught between midnight and dawn, the weather turning for the worse again, the crack and boom of thunder like artillery, with bullets of rain strafing the roof.
She had to be sleeping some of the time, though, and dreaming of something other than insomnia. She knew perfectly well she was in a bed, but there were times in the night when it felt as if she were still below, deeper than she’d gone this morning, in the cold of the depths far beyond the reach of the sun, drifting beside leviathan walls lit by a phosphorescence whose source she couldn’t pin down. The walls themselves were tricky to navigate, like being on the outside of a maze, yet still lost within it, finding herself turning strange corners that seemed to jut outward, only to find that they turned in. She was going to drown down here, swamped by a sudden thrashing panic over her air tank going empty, only to realise…